Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

teevee

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I don’t have enough time to turn all of these thoughts into what they want to be. I just ate breakfast in front of a one-two punch of Springer’s “Prostitutes Tell All” and Katie Couric ogling Janet Jackson’s abs on the post-Grammy fashion wrap-up. My brain is fried.

Last night was wickedly cold, and if i hadn’t noticed it on my walk down to campus or sprint to the train station, then i definitely noticed it when we wound up waiting a half an hour for the train home after the show My scarf wrapped all around my head in an attempt to retain warmth and Kat edging around to stand so i was between her and the wind, and both of us jumping up and down and trying to find the right key for us both to sing Pinkerton songs in.

I calmly explained my theory on opening acts as we sat at the back of the room and surveyed the crowd. First i place them on my musical spectrum, and then i speculate on if i could vanquish them in unarmed song-to-song combat. A good opening act doesn’t quite fit on my spectrum because they don’t have obvious influences; an amazing opening act convinces me that i couldn’t possibly walk up on stage, pick up a guitar, and please the crowd as much or more than s/he did.

Burning my tongue so badly on chai that i got stuck between try to scream, swallow, or just spit it out. Having to picture the taste of everything afterwards.

Charlie knowing my name and where i lived even though i hadn’t seen him for half a year and letting me off the shuttle at the corner of Walnut street where i knew that, despite the utterly desolate chill in the air, i was close to my door. How i let my scarf unravel from the knot it had formed around my neck until it was just being carried by the wind behind me. Me running down 44th street trailing my monochrome scarf behind me like a kite, giggling into the thin air and barely breathing.

Pillows taking up half my bed.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/02/10225422/

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I fell asleep sometime between the last vignette of Futurama and the beginning of Malcom in the Middle, mostly because i wasn’t especially interested in the squawing of the FOX network or the pointless Eagles game. So, i wound up in bed with headphones on seeing if i could figure out the chords to every song on This Way before Jewel found her way through the second repletion of a chorus (and was largely succeeding). Eventually this dissolved into my half-heartedly fretting a C-chord on my electric guitar while lying flat on my back in bed with Jewel cooing something in my ear. And then there was sleep, desperate clinging sleep during which i subconsciously decided that a nap would be deadly for my daily schedule, and so i had to turn a two-hour rest of the eyes into an all-nighter.

Nine hours later, lying huddled underneath two blankets trying my best to keep my eyes shut against the incessant glow of my monitor, it suddenly occurred to me: why bother? I’ve become a stickler for sleep recently, trying to get back onto the steady schedule i had last semester, but no amount of benadryll and warm milk is going to change the fact that i like to stay up very late and wake up early — which typically involves a nap somewhere in the middle. A quick foray into the kitchen for left-over pizza suddenly turned into an hour-long cruise of my favourite weblogs, and now i’m up and wired for a day free of academic offerings; all i have to do is look handsome around six to attract the attention of certain people at rehearsal. So, i should just Let It Be because i can … because i don’t have anything to do today until past sunset, and i can nap plenty of times between now and then.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2002/01/8479394/

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Maybe what’s really getting to me is how different life actually is from television. Of course, we all know that television is just fiction, even when its plotlines are ripped from the proverbial headlines. Still, i know that i’m guilty of always expecting life to be a little more like teevee: constructing killer teasers and opening scenes in my head to neatly wrap up all of the threads my friends and i are tangled up in. Not surprisingly, there’s a theory of communication to match this sensation, and it was coined by a Dean from just down the street.

No, not from Drexel (ha!), from Penn. The man’s name is George Gerbner, and my academic obsession du jour is his Cultivation Theory. Gerbner’s entire study is based around acts of violence that consume a frightening amount of the television we watch every day. His hypothesis, which has been proven again and again through extensive field study, is that the amount of violence we watch regularly on television is an accurate predictor of the amount of violence we expect in our day to day lives. Gerbner even accounts for such an occasional addict as myself, accurately assigning me a low level of anxiety about real-life violence (and, i’m mostly just afraid of being ambushed from around dark corners by vampires).

My current kvetch isn’t about violence, though, it’s about sex. My textbook’s condensed version of Cultivation doesn’t address violence’s sordid little sister at all, and i somehow doubt that good’ol’ George would invite a visit from a random Drexel student just to talk about making whoopee, so i guess i have to field this one on my own.

Does the sexual content of television affect my expectations about life? I’d say that it does, without a doubt. I’ve watched a lot of boob-tube in my life, and i have to say that i expect out of romance what i have been taught to look for. I expect torrid affairs and even more torrid breakups … i expect magical first kisses and even more magical first times … i expect random hook ups and even more random pairings with friends i’ve had forever. Sometimes life comes through for me, and sometimes it doesn’t. All through high school i was waiting for that magic catalyst that all of my favorite characters seemed to have received to get my love-live jump-started. It never came. College came on hotter and heavier, but with a bit of deceit: those big-kid parties weren’t what i had been lead to expect. Despite that, some things actually did come out perfect. And, some breakups are just as torrid as the affairs that precede them.

If life complies just once out of an entire year with what we’re hoping for, suddenly we are infused with a sense of resonance … the feeling of our existence actually breaking down and mirroring the media just like we were secretly long for it to do. Every time we get what we want, we immediately want more; why shouldn’t we get more of what the onscreen couples have? I’ve been sitting on my couch like a proverbial potato this week watching a slew of beautiful people bed down with other people… i’ve watching scenes jump from a few tentative kisses to the morning after. I watched Buffy decide to have sex and follow through on it without coming up for air from her violent kiss. In a way i really do want it… all of it, and i feel like i’m missing something just because i don’t have it. Not because i am missing the companionship they have, or the happiness, but the raw energy that lies between the first kiss and the next morning.

The only problem is that characters don’t seem to worry about consequences, mostly because consequence is what keeps them on the air. In reality, people pay for consequences with more kinds of currency than i like to keep count of.

And, here i am, all alone in my room putting off another phone call to the one person i have the tiniest inkling of any relative interest from at all. What am i more afraid of, that it’s bound to fizzle out unlike my onscreen brethren — or that it might snowball into something i’m not ready to deal with faster than i can deal with it? I suppose it’s just like asking if i’m richer or poorer for hanging on to so much of my so-called currency.

One thing’s for sure… George Gerbner is right about television: it isn’t necessarily about real life, but it colors our perceptions of it a lot more than we initially let on.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7491037/

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I didn’t watch very much television last year; it’s not as though it plays a very important role in my life. I think our local news is insipid, i don’t pay for cable, and i don’t like to feel like my time is being wasting by a gaggle of fictional half-wits every week just so they can make People list of beautiful people.

Having established my general indifference towards the idiot box, i also have to admit that i love watching it in social settings. I love heckling it, and arguing over which character is cuter, and screaming in horror or delight at the newest contrivance of plot that leads two characters into one bed.

I think i could get by just on the WB, as long as i just pretend that Buffy isn’t actually a couple of channels away (though it’s still at the same time, on the same night). I’ve gotten used to despising Buffy, but lately she and the Scooby Gang have been delightfully on: on with their humor, on with their schlocky demons of the week, and on with a level of acting rarely exhibited on 20-Something dramas… namely my other two WB regulars, Dawson’s Creek and Felicity. Yes, i know they’re boring, insipid, insulting hours of teevee. Yes, i set aside Wednesday night just to see them.

This week i managed to catch all three of the aforementioned programs, and there is one theme that joined them all: sex. I know that it “sells,” but the current fixation with it is astounding. Buffy and Spike. Pacey and that waitress. Dawson and Jen. Noel and that floozy. Ben and Felicity. I’m sure even more whoopee was going on off camera. The thing that’s so unusual is the way the sex happens… on television, foreplay is equivalent to the kiss after the shirt comes off but before the groping starts. Buffy skipped it entirely, instead just unzipping Spike and climbing aboard. Pacey seemed like he might just fool around, but in the next scene it was obvious his clothes had been taken off and then put back on. Felicity and Ben shared a make-up kiss, laid down on the bed, and the next thing we knew they had been “in there for an hour.”

But, the most shocking of all of the intercourse i’ve witnessed in the past two days was Dawson’s. Dawson, one of the few remaining Virgins out of the long-running formerly-teeny-bopper shows. Dawson was my hero because, in the 90210 of my life, i am Dawson … i have plenty of potential romantic entanglements, but they’re all fizzle. Yet, in this inescapably well-scripted episode he goes from joking about dating Jen, to sortof dating Jen, to kissing Jen. And then… well, we know what comes then.

It’s the lack of foreplay that gets me, i suppose. Here’s Dawson, my V-club buddy of primetime, and he melts from one kiss down to a tangle of limbs and lust. This is not to say i would not be similarly tempted by Michelle Williams, but to have lost it in such a blasé fashion totally outside of any sort of relationship seems to defeat the entire Virgin thing to begin with. Of course, it’s not like Dawson and I were waiting for marriage, or even for the right time and place. We were just waiting.

Up until tonight, that is. And, despite the questionable circumstances of his tryst, i’m happy for Dawson … he slept with someone who he really loves as a friend, and immediately afterwards he felt right about it (which is less than we could say for poor Pacey earlier in the episode). It’s just the quantity of the sex, and the apparent quality of the sex, … and the way that five or six kisses immediately lead to sex that’s … starting to get to me.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7490475/

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Today was a cranky day, and yes, that is the sound of me spending an entire 48 hours only departing the apartment once, to take out the trash. We are all a bit cranky tonight, and i decided after intermittently coloring in a coloring book and blankly staring at the teevee for a fourth hour to say “goodnight” and get the hell out of the living room. The thing about living in a threesome of people is that it’s always two on one, and yesterday it was me and Lindsay versus Erika so today was them versus me. Erika and i hardly ever team up against Lindsay so much as we just hang out by ourselves. It actually doesn’t bother me in the least, but the intelligent thing to do was to extract myself before it did bother me. So, i came up here and recorded a suck-ass Trio.


Meanwhile, my cold has kept me substance free all weekend, and don’t think that has anything to do with being in the house, either. The ladies put a sizeable dent into a few bottles in the wet-bar, and i consumed three cartons of orange juice and one of ice cream. Such is a sleepy weekend, solely composed of naps, guitars, musical Buffy episodes that left me gasping and in shock, and blowout Eagles games. Makes me feel real, at least…

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7050450/